Board Bring-Up: Radxa Dragon Q6A with Mainline Linux and Yocto
Radxa Dragon 6A
The Radxa Dragon Q6A is a credit card-sized single-board computer built around Qualcomm’s QCS6490 — the same silicon family found in the Fairphone 5 and Qualcomm’s own RB3gen2 reference platform. It packs an octa-core Kryo 670 CPU, an Adreno 643 GPU, and a 12 TOPS Hexagon NPU into a board with Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6, HDMI, triple camera connectors, and an M.2 NVMe slot. Starting at around $60, it sits in an interesting spot — significantly more compute per dollar than a Raspberry Pi 5, with a genuine ML inference pipeline that doesn’t require an external accelerator. Qualcomm provides Yocto builds for RB3Gen2 boards and Radxa mentions this in their documentation but doesn’t provide any how-to. In this article, we shall explore the steps taken to get Yocto running with Mainline Linux Kernel.
Mainline Linux 7.0 running on Arduino Q
Here are steps to reproduce it by yourself, if you are the happy owner of this board, currently priced at 48 EUR on the Arduino shop for the 2 GB version. This is done without removing the original kernel. Your board will still boot such kernel by default.
Setup and prerequisites
To do this by yourself, you will need:
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An Arduino Q board
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A USB-C hub with external power, to power the board and to connect external devices such as USB mass storage or USB-Ethernet.
Contributions to Linux 6.19
Root Commit’s contributions to Linux 6.19
Linux 6.19 is out with 7 contributions from Root Commit:
Using Yocto to build images for Orange Pi 3B
Introduction
Orange PI 3B is a cheap and attractive Raspberry Pi sized single board computer based on the Rockchip RK3566:
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Rockchip RK3566 (4x ARM Cortex-A55 @ 1.6GHz)
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ARM Mali-G52-2EE GPU (OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.0/3.1/3.2, Vulkan 1.1, OpenCL 2.0)
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LPDDR4 RAM (2/4/8 GB)
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Micro-SD card slot
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SPI flash (16/32 MB)
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Optional eMMC pluggable module (16/32/64/128/256 GB)
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Wi-Fi5 + Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
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1x USB 2.0 Type A OTG, 2x USB 2.0 Type A HOST, 1x USB 3.0 Type A Host
Orange Pi RV2 RISC-V board running Linux 6.18-rc1
Introduction
Five days ago, I received the Orange Pi RV2 board I ordered. For about 54 EUR / 64 USD (+ shipping), this board has very attractive features, in particular:

Top view - Source Orange Pi
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8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM (2 and 4 GB options exist)
Yocto security: Kernel Hardening
This is another blog post about securing your Yocto built systems:
Introduction
The Linux kernel is the cornerstone and stronghold of a Linux based system. Unlike user-space applications which run with limited privileges, if it’s compromised, there is almost no limit to what an attacker can do.
While nothing is unbreakable, there are two types of settings you can change to make your kernel harder to compromise:
Yocto bookmark and new training dates


Bookmark
After a brief announcement two weeks ago, here is the new Yocto command reference bookmark, in a format you can print and modify, according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
In particular, the PDF version is ready to be printed. This way you will get 5 bookmarks on double-sided A4 paper.
The documents were created with the Scribus open-source publishing application. It’s a great program to create leaflets, brochures and any professional looking documents. Sources are available in our GitLab repository.
Linux 6.17 is out and already running at Root Commit
Linux 6.17 has just been released, and it’s already running here at Root Commit.
The first system it’s been running on is this Toradex Verdin iMX8M Mini SOM (below the heat sink!) on the Dahlia Carrier board. I’m using this board for a medical device project at the moment.
Here are my notes for building Linux 6.17 for this device:
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Get the Linux 6.17 sources (through
gitor tarball)
Yocto Security: Production and Development Images
This blog post is part of a series about securing your Yocto built systems:
What to avoid
So, you use Yocto to build an image for your embedded device. You tweak the image and distribution settings to get the features you need, and other developers use the SDK built by Yocto to create and build the User Interface and other applications.
"Securing Yocto Built Systems" presentation slides









Last week, I gave a “Making Yocto Built Images More Secure” presentation at the Embedded Linux Conference in Amsterdam.
The main goal was to share the research I’ve done so far for a customer project, and gather feedback from the audience.

